Famitsu DC Charts the DC's Sales

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For those who'd like to compare the DC's sales to the early sales for the PlayStation and Saturn...

By IGN Staff

While paging through a recent issue of Famitsu DC (one of the billion-or-so Dreamcast-specific magazines in Japan), we stumbled upon an interesting image. The magazine has crafted a chart of the number of shipped units for the Dreamcast, PlayStation, and Saturn in the months after the launch of each system. In the scan below, the Dreamcast is represented in orange, the Saturn in black, and the PlayStation in gray. The numbers on the X-axis represent the months following the launch, with the numbers on the Y-axis representing units shipped in 10,000s.

Despite the fact that the chart represents units shipped, we can make the assumption that retailers aren't just blindly buying the system regardless of sales. In the initial months, at least, most of the hardware shipped sold out, so the shipped numbers for the early months can be taken as equivalent to the number of units sold.

There are some interesting trends in this chart that I'd like to point out. The chart shows that the Saturn sold-in (sold to retailers) more units than the PlayStation for a good deal of its early life. This is indeed true, as the Saturn rode high off of Virtua Fighter, and saw continued strong sales through Virtua Fighter II's release. It wasn't until Final Fantasy VII was announced that the PlayStation started to give Saturn the boot.

Also revealed by the chart is that the Saturn managed to outsell the Dreamcast by just a bit in the first couple of months. One reason to explain this is that Sega had considerable difficulty in producing the Dreamcast; while the Saturn was no piece of cake to produce either, Sega didn't have nearly the same problems for that system.

We'll keep track of the Dreamcast's performance in the coming months and report back to you on whatever trends we see.